Deep Storm: A Novel

It looked, Peter Crane thought, like a stork: a huge white stork, rising out of the water on ridiculously delicate legs. But as the helicopter drew closer and the distant outline sharpened against the sea horizon, the resemblance gradually fell away. The legs grew sturdier, became tubular pylons of steel and pre-stressed concrete. The central body became a multi-level superstructure, studded with flare stacks and turbines, festooned with spars and girders. And the thin, neck-like object above resolved into a complex crane-and-derrick assembly, rising several hundred feet above the superstructure.

The pilot pointed at the approaching platform, held up two fingers. Crane nodded his understanding.

It was a brilliant, cloudless day, and Crane squinted against the bright ocean stretching away on all sides. He felt tired and disoriented by travel: commercial flight from Miami to New York, private Gulfstream G150 charter to Reykjavik, and now helicopter. But the weariness hadn't blunted his deep--and growing--curiosity.

It wasn't so much that Amalgamated Shale was interested in his particular expertise: that he thought he could understand. It was the hurry with which they'd wanted him to drop everything and rush out to the Storm King platform that surprised him. Then there was the fact that AmShale's forward headquarters in Iceland had, rather oddly, been bustling with technicians and engineers rather than the usual drillers and roughnecks.

And then there was the other thing. The helicopter pilot wasn't an AmShale employee. He wore a Navy uniform--and a sidearm.

As the chopper banked sharply around the side of the platform, heading for the landing zone, Crane realized for the first time just how large the oil rig was. The jacket structure alone had to be eight stories high. Its upper deck was covered with a bewildering maze of modular structures. Here and there, men in yellow safety uniforms checked couplings and worked pump equipment, dwarfed by the machinery that surrounded them. Far, far below, the ocean frothed and worried around the pillars of the substructure, where it vanished beneath the surface to run the thousands of feet to the sea floor itself.

The chopper slowed, turned, and settled down onto the green hexagon of the landing zone. As Crane reached back for his bags, he noticed that someone was standing at the edge of the LZ, waiting: a tall, thin woman in an oilskin jacket. He thanked the pilot, opened the passenger door, and stepped out into frigid air, ducking instinctively under the whirring blades.

The woman held out her hand at his approach. "Dr. Crane?"

Crane shook the hand. "Yes."

"This way, please." The woman turned and led the way off the landing platform, down a short set of stairs, and along a metal catwalk to a closed, submarine-style hatch. She did not give her name.

A uniformed seaman stood guard outside the hatch, rifle at his side. He nodded as they approached, opened the hatch, then closed and secured it behind them.

Beyond lay a spacious, brightly-lit corridor, studded along both sides with open doors. There was no frantic hum of turbines, no deep throbbing of derrick equipment. The smell of oil, though detectable, was faint, almost as if efforts had been made to remove it.

Crane followed the woman, bags slung over his shoulder, glancing curiously into the rooms as he passed. Once again, curiosity pricked at him: there were laboratories full of whiteboards and workstations; computer centers; communications suites. Topside had been quiet, but there was plenty of activity here.

Crane decided he'd venture a question. "Are the divers in a hyperbaric chamber?" he asked. "Can I see them now?"

"This way, please," the woman repeated.

They turned a corner, descended a staircase, and entered another hallway, even wider and longer than the first. The rooms they passed were larger here: machine shops, storage bays for high-tech equipment Crane didn't recognize. Crane frowned. Although Storm King resembled an oil rig in all outward appearances, it was clearly no longer in the business of pumping crude.

What the hell is going on here?

"Have any vascular specialists or pulmonologists been flown in from Iceland?" he asked.

The woman didn't answer, and Crane shrugged. He'd come this far--he could stand to wait another couple of minutes.

Up ahead, the woman had stopped before a closed door of gray metal. "Mr. Lassiter is waiting for you," she said.

Lassiter? Crane wondered. That wasn't a name he recognized. The person who'd spoken to him over the phone, briefed him about the problem at the rig, had been named Simon. He glanced at the door. There was the nameplate, white letters on black plastic, spelling out E. Lassiter, External Liaison.